An upset was in the air.
With just 22 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the 1-4 Raptors Uprising GC were leading the undefeated Blazer5 Gaming, 59-57, and had possession.
Point guard TsJosh dribbles the ball over the time line and stops at the wing, but passes out before he can get trapped by a desperate Blazers squad sending double teams everywhere trying to get the ball back.
The ball lands in Kenny’s virtual arms and the Raptors first-ever NBA 2K League player stays poised with the ball and sends it back to TsJosh who spots a wide-open Yusuf_Scarbz along the right baseline for what could be a game-finishing jimmy.
The Raptors centre doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger, but there’s still six seconds left on the shot clock and eight for the game. Was this the wisest decision?
He misses, and the Blazers come down and send the game into overtime, right as time expires. They then finish the job in extra time, leaving a stunned Raptors group with nothing but a dismal 1-5 record to show for all their effort so far in the season.
That was exactly 76 days ago. A time span that saw Raptors Uprising lose only once more in regulation play and win five straight to close the season, earning them a No. 4 seed in the inaugural NBA 2K League playoffs, beginning Friday night at 6:00 p.m. ET with 76ers GC facing off against Wizards District Gaming on Twitch.
The Raptors aren’t scheduled to play Friday until 8:00 p.m. ET, against No. 5 seed Cavs Legion GC, but regardless how things shake out in that game, the simple fact this team even made the post-season to begin with is an astounding feat.
As evidenced by that game against the Blazers, who finished the season as the No. 1 seed, Raptors Uprising had a rough go of things in the early stages of their year. Their 1-5 start was actually just for regulation play, not counting the season-opening tip-off tournament which doesn’t count against their actual record. So if you take that into consideration, the team was actually staring at an even gloomier 2-7 record after that Blazers defeat.
However, instead of sulk and just go through the motions of what was looking like a lost inaugural season, the six members of the team – Joshua “TsJosh” McKenna, Kenneth “Kenny” Hailey, Yusuf “Yusuf_Scarbz” Abdulla, Trevon “All Hail Trey” Hendrix, Christopher “Detoxys” Doyle and Seanquai “KingQuai614” Harris – took a hard look at some of the mistakes they were making – such as taking a shot with six ticks left on the shot clock and eight in the game when you’re up – and began erasing them, leading to newfound success almost immediately.
After that defining loss to the Blazers, the Raptors played in the first mid-season tournament of the year – an event, like the tip-off tournament, that didn’t count against their record – and wiped the floor against fellow supposed bottom-feeder Pacers Gaming in their first match of the tournament only to then lose, for the third time in all competitions, to the Blazers.
This wasn’t a great result if you just look the 1-1 showing and a 3-8 record across all matches, but it was probably the first positive step the club took to begin its dramatic turnaround.
A close examination of their schedule up to that point shows that Raptors Uprising had faced the league-leading Blazers three times already, had been hard-luck losers in three overtime contests and that one of the wins on their resume included the 76ers, a team that finished second in the standings and only lost four times all season.
So not all was as it seemed, and the team knew it.
“Truly, of all the things that have kept me up at night – we’ve had a lot going on from a sponsor perspective, a content perspective, just a league perspective – our performance has not been one of them,” Shane Talbot, MLSE esports manager, told Sportsnet in mid-June.
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Talbot is the man largely responsible for drafting the team and setting them up for success. Formerly the chief operating officer of Canadian-founded esports organization Luminosity Gaming, Talbot has brought practices from the traditional esports industry with him to Raptors Uprising.
And it’s this guidance that he has brought to the club that played such a major role in it finishing with an 8-6 record after such a dismal start.
“Probably the importance of culture,” said Brendan Donohue, the NBA 2K League’s managing director, over the phone Friday about what surprised him the most observing this season. “I thought that talent would rule in terms of who was gonna win. I actually think everybody underestimated how important leadership inside of a team and culture may determine a team’s ability to succeed.”
“I think the fact that [Raptors Uprising] started out 1-5 and then they turned it around to finish as one of the hottest teams in the league right now,” Donohue added as a specific example of the importance of ledership in action. “I think their sense of togetherness and sense of culture that they’ve developed on that team –they play together, they play unselfishly –I think that’s a huge piece of their success.”
Included in the positive culture the Raptors were trying to create this season was the different ways they got themselves involved with prospective fans by hosting tournaments and holding viewing parties, something that won the organization the 2K League’s 2018 Community Engagement Award.
But chief among what Talbot brought to the team, as far as direction goes, was the gaming house concept, anl esports tradition that sees teams eat, sleep and practice with each other in a pseudo boot-camp environment in order to quickly come together as a unit in a short amount of time.
In Raptors Uprising’s case, their house was a fair bit swankier than you’d see in most esports teams, coming with bells and whistles such as a pool table, a big deck with a barbecue and, most importantly, a film room, an area of the facility Talbot credits for much of the team’s improvement.
“What’s been most difficult is looking at film and realizing that mistakes we’ve made has cost us games – things like shot-clock management. But at the same time what that has taught us more than any other team who haven’t gone through that adversity yet.”
No 2K League team has gone through the level of adversity that the Raptors have and come out as strong. Now the post-season, and its $600,000 of total prize money up for grabs, awaits.
“We’ve learned from our mistakes, and that’s the important thing I keep telling these guys,” said Talbot. “Making a mistake is fine, just don’t make it twice.”
They’ve made this their mantra for the last two months and could be rewarded with $300,000 if they keep it up for just one more week.
